Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

Very enlightening read on the USA Secretary of State Hillary Clinton…..

” “WHY extremists always focus on women is a mystery to me. But they all seem to. It doesn’t matter what country they’re in. They want to control women. They want to control how we dress, they want to control how we act, they want to control everything about us.” So said Hillary Clinton last month to a young Arab woman who had asked her at a public meeting about wearing the hijab. This encounter was in Tunis, where Mrs Clinton had just taken part in an international summit on Syria. She had come straight from London, where she attended a meeting on Somalia, and went on to Algeria and Morocco before making the nine-hour hop back to Washington, DC.

If Barack Obama is re-elected in November, one big thing is going to be different in his second term. He will no longer have his relentlessly globe-trotting former presidential rival at his side. As the frazzled aides and reporters who travel regularly in the back of her converted Boeing 757 attest, the job is punishing, especially the way she has chosen to do it.

Since taking office, Mrs Clinton has visited 95 countries (see map) and logged some 730,000 miles, sometimes cramming more than a dozen meetings into a single day. This marathon came hard after the titanic Democratic presidential campaign of 2008. “I’ve had an extraordinary 20 years. I’ve been really at the highest levels of American political life,” she told The Economist in a recent interview, “I need a little time to reflect, step off the fast track I’ve been on.”

Evaluating her record is a complicated business. The job of a secretary of state has at least three parts: implementing foreign policy, acting as America’s global ambassador and running the behemoth that is the State Department. “

“From this lofty perch, he has come to two conclusions about American evangelicals.

The first is that they have become too callous, a somewhat ironic charge coming from a protege of Falwell, who blamed gays and pagans for the Sept. 11 attacks and called the Islamic prophet Muhammad a “terrorist.” Moore says evangelicals have cared too much in recent decades about building massive megachurches for the upper-middle class and too little about getting their hands dirty serving the poor.

His second conclusion is more Falwell-esque: Evangelicals are becoming too liberal about their faith. To Moore, if you say you believe in the Bible as literal truth, but privately believe it’s a metaphor, you’re a phony. In a new book called “Honestly: Really Living What We Say We Believe,” Moore rails against “fake cultural Christianity.”

“When I choose to believe in God, I don’t get to choose what I want to believe, and I don’t get to decide what truth is worth believing. I choose whom to believe, and he gets to tell me what to believe,” he writes. For Moore, Christianity leads to conservative politics.

The Bible says man, not government, is responsible for his own behavior. God, not the government, should decide when life begins or ends. The Bible says people will take the easy route if offered them, which is what he believes the new Obama-backed health-care law does for young adults, many of whom can now remain on their parents’ health plans.

“If I’m confused on something, I go to a higher source,” he says, “the Bible.” ”

“When he’s not on his farm about an hour outside Montreal, it is from that office that Mr. Martin, the man who fixed Canada’s fiscal mess in the 1990s as Jean Chrétien’s finance minister and gave rise to the Group of 20, is waging his many post-political battles. He chairs the Congo Basin Forest Fund, which aims to end poverty in the 10-nation region. He advises the Coalition for Dialogue on Africa, which examines critical issues facing the continent. He guides the Martin Aboriginal Educational Initiative, a not-for-profit organization he established to help native youth.

And these days, as governments and central bankers around the world grapple with punishing debt loads, painful public spending cuts and the shocks of the 2008 financial meltdown, his focus is on ensuring such a collapse doesn’t happen again. Frustratingly, he says, people aren’t grasping just how desperate the situation is.

“They think this is an American or British or European problem. It is today, but tomorrow it’s going to be a Chinese problem or it’s going to be an Indian problem. And there’s no reason to think that Chinese banks, Indian banks, when they’re as big as Citigroup, aren’t going to have the same problems.”

So here’s how Mr. Martin, who still advises the International Monetary Fund, would fix the world: “……

First reaction to the event in Norway is the human sadness surrounding it. On the heels comes the seeking of understanding….of who and what is the motive for it. This is going to require a serious examination. In democracies we have a built in tolerance level for difference of thought….how far do we let the pendulum swing where it then threatens to harm the very democratic society that allows the freedom of thought to exist in the first place ? That calls for God given discernment, knowledge, understanding and wisdom.

” “But neither does Norway exist in a vacuum. Its right-wing scene is connected to the rest of Europe through the Internet forums where hate speech proliferates and through right-wing demonstrations that draw an international mix of participants.

“This may be the act of a lone, mad, paranoid individual,” said Hajo Funke, a political scientist at the Free University in Berlin who studies rightist extremism, referring to the right-wing fundamentalist Christian charged in connection with the killings, “but the far-right milieu creates an atmosphere that can lead such people down that path of violence.” ”

Like this:

Murdock’s misdeeds…the view from an Obama confidant … and yes , the feeding and the dining at the table of the media slant from Fox News etc does affect a certain significant portion of the USA public’s views on political issues.

And they wanted to create a ” Fox News Canada”….

“Here’s Mr. Podesta on troubles at a media company that has made a mission out of harassing the U.S. President:

“Fox in particular … is a significant factor in the structure of the dialogue and media in the [United] States … if you look at people’s attitudes by where they get their news from – you can go back to the Iraq war, climate change, a number of factors – regular Fox viewers’ knowledge of just the factual basis of public debates, you see it’s quite different from people who get their news from other sources.

“So there’s no question that it’s been significant in public life and political life in the United States …”